Tracking and Billing Independent Contactor Time

These latter two timekeeping methods can be maintained separately from QuickBooks with the time information imported into QuickBooks. Below is an example of a timesheet for Martin Short, a subcontractor we pay by the hour and have added as a vendor subject to 1099 reporting. We have set up a service item call "Hourly labor" for which we pay Mr. Short $12.50 per hour and bill at $20 per hour. First, we enter time for Mr. Short below to a weekly timesheet. Notice that are only passing through our cost to the "Mike Balak: Utility Shed" project.

Now, it’s the end of the week and Mr. Short would like us to write him a check. We open the "Write Checks" form and enter "Martin Short". We get a message "this name has time data in the company file, do we want this check to reflect that time?" We select "Yes"

We are prompted to select the time period for which we will pay.

We now have the time loegged for Mr. Short paid on this check at our rate of $12.50 per hour.

Now we are ready to bill for Mr. Short’s time on the "Mike Balak: Utility Shed" project. We select "Invoice for Time and Expenses" from the "Customers" menu, then, the "Mike Balak: Utility Shed" project. We now have our invoice ready to bill. Note that Mr. Short’s time is billed at a rate of $20 per hour which we defined in the "Hourly labor" item.

Robert Guild is certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor in Austin, TX who conducts CPE courses for CPAs and individual training and group classes to QuickBooks users. His company, Accounting Insight, maintains a sixteen-station QuickBooks lab, providing hands-on training. You can contact him directly at rguild@accountinginsight.biz or follow him on twitter at QBPro